August 2014

August 31, 2014

The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, begun over 100 years ago, has just been completed - the final word zythum, a type of fermented malt drink, has just been added. Oxford historian Robert Whitwell, whose aim was to publish the medieval Latin equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, began the project in 1913. Before now, scholars looking at British source documents had to rely on a reference book first published in the 17th century.

All dictionaries supply far more information than simply definitions or translations, and this one is no exception. It gives a picture of life in the medieval era. For instance, the entry for muzzle makes reference to a muzzle being made for a polar bear that was kept in the Tower of London; the animal had to be restrained when it was brought to fish in the river Thames. A record from a coroner's court refers to a woman who died when she fell down a well chasing her cat, which was chasing a mouse.

The dictionary, published by the British Academy, runs to 17 volumes. For more on the story, see this BBC piece.

August 30, 2014

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing (or the other way round, 'the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing') is a common expression -- it is often used critically about government departments or large organisations to indicate a lack of co-ordination between different departments, a situation where there are conflicting or contradictory objectives being pursued by different departments, or a complete unawareness on the part of managers of what is going on. The speaker on the Thought for the Day segment in this morning's Today programme on Radio 4 (listen here for a few more days - scroll to 00:46), drew attention to the biblical origin of this phrase. Martin Wroe was referring to the current 'ice bucket challenge' craze among celebrities, and the desire by celebrities to have their charitable activities recorded for all to see.

The phrase comes originally from Matthew 6:3 in the Bible: 'But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth'. Here, we are being advised to be discreet when we give to charity.

August 28, 2014

You know the word apostrophe, but what about anastrophe, which was Oxford Dictionaries 'word of the day' today. The definition is 'The inversion of the usual order of words or clauses', the sort of thing that occurs in literature or poetry for effect, even children's poetry (eg the line 'Mother, he said, said he' in the lovely children's rhyme by AA Milne Disobedience). Another example, again said for effect, would be something like 'Rocket science it ain't'. Yoda from Star Wars uses the rhetorical device of anastrophe, eg 'When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not.'

The strophe bit of the word anastrophe is Greek for 'turn'. So, what have apostrophes got to do with turning? What's the link? The original meaning of apostrophe was, according to the OE, 'A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent'. So, there's the 'turn'. The second entry for apostrophe in the OED gives today's meaning, but originally it referred, not just to the punctuation mark, but to the act of omission of one or two letters in a word itself - as the OED says 'turning away, or elision'. This meaning came into English via French and, again according to the OED, 'It ought to be of three syllables in English as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with [the other sense of apostrophe]'.

August 26, 2014

Sir Walter Scott was the subject of the second programme in Andrew Marr’s series Great Scots (watch here on iPlayer for another week or so or here on YouTube). His novels are not so popular these days but he was certainly very widely read and admired in many countries in his own day (early 19th century). One manifestation of this is the name of Edinburgh’s main railway station – Waverley – named after Scott’s first novel.

Marr also noted that Scott popularised the term Wars of the Roses, which he used in his 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein. This got me wondering what other terms Sir Walter Scott is associated with. There are several. A Dandie Dinmont is a Scottish terrier, and the dog got its name from a character in Scott’s Guy Mannering. This novel also popularised the Scottish idiom blood is thicker than water, although Scott didn’t coin it. The phrases the back of beyond and to show the cold shoulder are first attested in The Antiquary. Redgauntlet contains the first known recorded use of infra dig (infra dignitatem had been used previously). The modern word beserk has developed from the noun Berserker (also spelled Berserkar or Berserkir), a ferocious Norse warrior, and the first two citations for this word are taken from Scott novels. Freelance is a common word today, with a thoroughly modern meaning, but it was Scott who used it first, in Ivanhoe, to mean a mercenary soldier.

August 25, 2014

This morning’s episode of the radio programme Fry’s English Delight, the last in the series incidentally, looked at plain English (listen here). I occasionally write posts about the Plain English Campaign (eg here), but I hadn’t known before today that its founder, Chrissie Maher, launched the campaign after she herself found official forms so difficult to understand – she only learnt to read and write when she was a teenager – and didn’t want others to suffer the embarrassment and humiliation of having to ask other people what something meant.

The SMOG readability measure was also discussed on the programme (SMOG stands for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook). This measure uses a complicated mathematical formula, based on two variables – word length and number of words in a sentence – to give an idea of how readable a text is and how suitable for its intended audience. Try it for yourself here.

Professor Colin Harrison blamed poor readability of exam questions, rather than student ignorance, for some poor school results. For instance, the question in a science paper ‘Which of these is a pungent gas?’ resulted in 34% of candidates getting the right answer, whereas when it was reworded as ‘Which of these gases would make you cough?’, 70% of candidates got it right. This shows, said Professor Harrison, that the exam paper is not testing scientific knowledge exclusively, but also requires a sophisticated level of vocabulary. He did a study to find out which is the hardest school subject to study, based on the language used when teaching and assessing the subject. The answer was geography. In other words, understanding geography involves getting to grips with lots of difficult words.

Alas, the most readable texts of all tend to be adverts and marketing blurb. In a study done among parents at a children’s hospital, the hardest documents or websites to understand were those purporting to offer help written by parents of children with a particular disease. They had become experts on the subject as a result of their own children’s experience, and so tended to use technical language. The texts that respondents found easiest to understand were advertising flyers and promotional booklets encouraging parents of newborns to buy a particular brand of baby formula. On the subject of advertising, one of the most successful advertising slogans ever – so successful that it has become an everyday idiom – is ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin’, a slogan for the decidedly unglamorous Ronseal wood sealant. Even the prime minister used it approvingly in one of his speeches (as discussed in this BBC piece).

Of course, there is more to suitability for particular age groups than the length of words and sentences. The sentence ‘To be or not to be’ uses very simple English, and a readability measure would tell us that it is appropriate for a six-year-old, but, as we all know, there’s more to this sentence than the words alone.

This blog post scores 18.9 on the SMOG gobbledygook index (see here for the tool), which means it is pitched at a level above The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. That is a fair enough estimation. I know that the people who read this blog are a brainy bunch.

August 24, 2014

Andrew Marr’s TV series Great Scots had James Boswell as its first subject (watch here on BBC iPlayer for another couple of weeks, or here on YouTube).

Scotland and England had united in 1707, and Marr noted that London in the early and mid-18th century was full of ambitious Scots. James Boswell was one of them. Following the Act of Union the English accent was considered the most prestigious regional variant, and many ambitious Scots felt obliged to abandon their Scottish accent and dialect words (such as wee, bairn and youthy), if they wanted to get on in the world. Johnson’s influential dictionary of 1755 contained few Scottish words or Scottish senses of words, even though five of his amanuenses were Scots. Some examples (copied verbatim) are:bursar: Students sent as exhibitioners to the universities in Scotland by each presbytery, from whom they have a small yearly allowance for four years.holograph: This word is used in the Scottish law to denote a deed written altogether by the granter’s own hand.minute: the first draft of any agreement in writing; this is common in the Scottish law.drotchel: An idle wench; a sluggard. In Scottish it is still used.scranch: to grind somewhat crackling between the teeth. The Scots retain it.sponk: a word in Edinburgh which denotes a match, or anything dipt in sulphur that takes fire.

Wee is in Johnson’s dictionary. He describes it as having a Saxon root and gives the definition ‘In Scotland it denotes small or little’. Youthy is in the Dictionary, but without reference to Scotland; Johnson defines it as ‘Young, youthful’ but then goes on to add ‘A bad word’. Bairn is not in.

James Boswell wrote the first-ever dictionary of the Scots language, although he did not complete or publish it. It was discovered only recently in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (I wrote a post on it, here, a few years ago).

August 23, 2014

The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitali Churkin, said that NATO’s objections to the sending of a Russian convoy into Ukraine reminded him of ‘the kingdom of crooked mirrors’ (see this BBC item). The metaphor crooked mirror (krivoe zerkalo, or кривое зеркало, in Russian) a reference to the distortion of reality, comes up frequently in Russian, though perhaps has less resonance with speakers of English; we would probably refer to Alice’s looking-glass, since most native English speakers are familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

For instance, there was a 1960s film, remade as a musical in 2007, entitled Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (in Russian Королевство Кривых Зеркал). This film was based on a novel with the same title written by the Soviet author Vitali Gubarev.

However, the image of crooked mirrors predates this book. In the early 20th century there was a very influential cabaret-theatre in St Petersburg called The Crooked Mirror, which was renowned for satire and parody. The name of the theatre was taken from the epigraph to Gogol’s famous satirical play of the 1830s, The Government Inspector, which was ‘If your face is crooked, don’t blame the mirror’ (На зеркало неча пенять, коли рожа крива).

August 22, 2014

A recent article in the Guardian by the psychologist and linguist Professor Steven Pinker criticises the so-called amateur language mavens who persist in thinking that something is ungrammatical, based on what they were once taught in school, or on what someone once told them (read the article here). He won't have been surprised to get over a thousand comments on the article, language being one of the subjects that everyone has a strong opinion about. Pinker highlights ten points often considered to be grammatical mistakes, and debunks the myths.

He says that if you remember being told at school not to start a sentence with And or Because, this was probably because your teachers were trying to help you know how to break sentences. However, there is little point in having to obey this rule when you are an adult. If you believe that it is ungrammatical to end a sentence with a preposition, you are following, not a time-honoured grammatical rule, but an arbitrary rule proposed by the 17th-century poet John Dryden, who said that English was analogous to Latin, but in actual fact was mainly implying that Ben Jonson was his inferior when it came to writing verse.

Another so-called rule remembered from one's early schooldays is that a pronoun serving as the complement of the verb to be should be in the nominative case, not the accusative. So, not 'Hi, it's me', as most people say, but 'Hi, it's I'. This rule came about, says Pinker, because of the usual three confusions: confusing English with Latin, confusing informal style with incorrect grammar, and confusing syntax with semantics.

In 2009 Obama had to swear, in his presidential inauguration, 'I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully', rather than, as had been said on previous such occasions, to solemnly swear 'that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States'. This was apparently because Chief Justice John Roberts could not bear to hear a verb (I will execute) being split - a similar bugbear to the question of whether infinitives should be split. This rule is again based on the premise that English is like Latin, but, of course, the infinitive is just one word in Latin (amare = to love), not two, as in English. Indeed, sometimes, as Pinker notes, splitting the infinitive makes very good sense as it clarifies the meaning. In the sentence 'The board voted immediately to approve the casino', is it the vote that is immediate or the approval? Many people will find the sentence ambiguous. The sentence 'The board voted to immediately approve the casino', even though it does have a split infinitive, makes the meaning clearer.

Other contentious issues raised by Pinker in this long article (cynics might notice that he has a new book coming out next month) concern the use of who or whom, that or which, and less or fewer. Read the full article here.

August 20, 2014

There was a piece on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning about cravats and whether they were coming back into fashion (listen here). It was popular during the Restoration and Regency periods of English history, but in recent decades has been considered primarily the preserve of rather rakish and louche types. The fashion journalist Amber Jane Butchart said that cravats were originally worn by Croatian mercenaries fighting for the French king in the 17th century. Indeed, the word cravat is derived from the French pronunciation of the Croatian word for Croat (Hrvat).

Listen to the interview here, or read a related article on the BBC website here.

August 19, 2014

Collins Dictionary invited me to take part in their Word-lover interview series - read the interview here.

Collins is one of the many dictionaries I have sitting on my bookshelf. It's one of the few big names in British English dictionaries for native speakers, along with Oxford and, to a lesser extent nowadays probably, Chambers. You can access their English and foreign language dictionaries free of charge from their website, plus read earlier interviews in their Word-lover interview series and other language-related articles.